As the two dancers writhed their way across the stage like two playful ferrets: lissome and lithe, yet somehow sexual and rubber-like all at the same time, Samantha knew that her permanently shattered ankle (a gift from an unruly sailor on that fateful, sultry night in Bangkok) would never again allow her to grace the stage with her presence; a fact that filled her with such torpid despair that she could feel her soul dissovling into a puddle of gray sticky matter, like one would expect to find in a corner in the subway, but not a pleasant and well-lit subway like they have in small European countries, but rather a corner of the Hoboken division of the New Jersey Transit system.

You want bad writing? I can do bad writing.

Beulah knew her chickens were hatched, that her soul was in danger of collapsing into splinters just like the time she was visiting her brother at San Quentin and inadvertently sat on a bunch of toothpicks that had been lovingly harvested into a sculpted wooden portrait of Oprah by tattooed prison inmates with endless time on their hands to glue toothpicks together and watch daytime tv (yes, as you can imagine that day was filled with drama too, but it is a different story for another time)... for it had been fifteen years since she had felt this way, that way a girl feels when a girl is feeling too much, too soon, and thinking twice as much as she is feeling, yet what was she supposed to do when faced with such emotion, such trepidation, such excitement and longing for something, anything to relieve the desire... oh yes, that desire... to do something, something so forbidden that she had sworn never to utter a thought of it again, oh no she mustn't she mustn't but of course she could not refrain from saying "Yes," as she looking directly into his eyes like a matador facing down a bull within the pages of an Ernest Hemingway tome, and she repeated it again, even though she knew in hear heart it was forbidden... "Yes, I will lambada with you."

*her* heart

After Bulwer-Lytton himself:

That eventide, while previously exhibiting a marked lack of traits both tenebrous and tempestuous, had as late begun to possess both varieties of characteristic, not exclusive of excessive precipitation—precipitation which demonstrated only the most breviloquent and intermittent of lacunae due in no inconsequential part to the paroxysmal eructations of the mistral’s breath, which blew a blustering trajectory along the thoroughfares (and what manifold and multifarious thoroughfares they are which cross and pierce the cityscape of that great English metropolis in which we find this tableau laid out) , causing a clack and clatter of gambrel and gable, and expending itself at last upon the sparse, exiguous conflagrations at the very tips of the mantles which flickered insufficiently in their globes, almost wholly unsuccessful in their unceasing quest to overcome the stygian crepuscule.

Hauling himself like an inverted lumberjack into the S.S. Rialto's lifeboat that was cast from it's churning deck like a petulant duchess hurling her perfect crystal goblet into the typhoon of a lover's infidelity exposed during her birthday ball, Martin Iago's improbably turgid biceps bucked like a buck's haunches rearing up to brace for the dinghy to capsize over him while desperately grasping for the other gunwale to mesh with his urgent fingers and pivot him into the boat like a mermaid's hand seeking his in the unrelenting undulations of the stormy sea of what could be his last journey to the orient.

Under the lights, on the pitcher's mound at the Little League World Series, Jeffrey "Nolan" Ryans threw — with every muscle in his body, eight and one half exhausting innings behind him and a full count, bases loaded, his Young Mariners just one run up over the loathesome Bay City Bosox and the BCB's most ferocious hitter staring him down from the plate, a ten-year-old with great big muscles and the beginnings of a beard and nothing but hatred and threat in his eyes as he twirled the bat over his shoulder all a-smirk and a-stare and unflinching even as Jeffery's body rapidly twisted and flexed — up.

I thought, as I searched for, in the pockets of the jacket that she, with that body that could drive a bishop to kick out a stained glass window, had given to me that rainy Sunday that was my thirtieth birthday, for my keys, that I should, for clarity, always endeavor to be concise in all my communications.

These are great!

Kandahar. Dusk. Dusty dusk. Musty dusty dusk. As Kandhar is, you know. Well, you probably don't, which is why I'm telling you.

She approached. How do I know it was her, given the muumuu thing they all wear? Well, it was her eyes. They're dark, see, and unique somehow, in a way that's hard to explain. But, anyway, one-of-a-kind eyes — two of a kind, in her case, since she had 'em both.

I was on patrol, and my weapon was heavy, but something made me try to take the jug off her shoulders. Racking my brain for something in Arabic, I tried "Halt! Show your hands" which I tried to say really nice, so she wouldn't think I was just another

The sun rose tentatively in the East Cleveland suburb of Hinckley Heights, seeming to pause briefly as it looked at its reflection in Lake Erie where a passing tanker appeared to splash its nether regions, and thus Dawn came out of the bathroom having discretely done the same and into the bedroom, the scene of the previous night's major-studio-quality mix of drama, passion, slapstick and 2-dimensional animation, stepping onto the head of the omnipresent semi-omniscient gray cat who, while for the last three years two months and eleven days as Dawn's least judgmental confidant had seen just about everything, did not see that coming.

Wendell looked longingly out the window at the bustling quad of San Jose State University, but not at the quads or the bustles of the students hurrying from place to place from class to class from Liberal Arts to Business Administration while he was trapped inside this room, stacked metaphorically to the ceiling with virtual manuscripts of the most vainglorious failures of literature, chained to the 17-inch CRT until he had read every one of the current year's fender-bending bumper crop of stinkweed that was the Bulwer-Lytton Writing Contest, realizing that these toxic tomes would strip his mind of the ability to type coherent thoughts into sentences for months to come, and he realized why the competition to be Professor Rice's teaching assistant attracted so few candidates.

The rain pounded caressingly against the walls of the asylum, and as Esmerelda stood by the window in her clingy white hospital she wished the screams of those dying from plague would stop, as they disturbed her contemplation of her manicure (damn patient Susie from Topeka alias Lady Jane Grey - she never got a French manicure quite right and was always trying to excuse herself on the basis of her pyschosis-induced Francophobia), and also disturbed Esmerelda's watch for the approach of Ramone, lumber jack extraordinaire and Esmerelda's dashing young lover, who had promised to rescue her the minute he heard the results of his third attempt at ninth grade and finished the tenth draft of his epic series of sonnets about dyslexic typesetters.

The sunset over the mountains of Cornvaleese was stupendous, redolent with reds and oranges and yellows and even a smidgen of green as the twin suns of Duzolaar dipped first one, then the other, under the crest of Grand Mount Ch'ranbry, luminescing its icy peaks and then fading into blues and purples. And as night fell in Fortnasen Valley, young Torvold had no idea, because he was in Gothenburg, Sweden and it was a grey, drab, sunless December afternoon and he was an hour away from finishing his shift at the Scandirail shipping facility.

Uighur strained to see through the mist and hear through the rustling trees and babbling brooks and lowing cows that filled the valley near the bridge, the small wooden bridge he had pledged his life to guard, he, the young strapping lad from Bergner-Weise who had just one week before held a ploughspit where now he held a gleaming sword, its hint of sharp death a reminder of how the least deviance of aim in its use could maim its user and well as its usee, and contemplated how now he had to make do with what he had been given as a consequence of fate and choice alike. Uighur steeled himself, concerned that the Berber army was just across the ridge and now engaging most of his friends and relatives and non-friends and non-relatives from towns further away, Berber mounted cavalry angrily slicing through man, son, brother and father without remorse and with naught visible through the visor but an alien scowl. As Uighur hefted again his sword for balance, his eyes and ears detected be-times the horse now almost on him, its rider exactly the picture that Uighur had formed in his mind.

Indeed, it was a dark and stormy knight.